[std-interval] Mathematical relations and default initialization

[Lawrence Crowl]

On 10/1/06, Sylvain Pion <Sylvain.Pion at sophia.inria.fr> wrote:
> > Is it "risky"? There are enough good interval systems out there for
> > market forces to weed out the shoddy ones or force them to improve. Or
> > am I naive?
>
> Well, past experience with C++98 shows that compiler vendors have
> priorities...
> And I don't see intervals as being the top-priority of the majority
> of customers to put pressure on vendors, so they might be tempted to
> implement a dumb thing just to claim standard compliance quickly.

My guess is that vendors will probably respond to an interval standard
in three stages:

(1) Ignore the intervals and put them on the list of unimplemented features.
Pretty much all compilers have them, particularly early in the standards
cycle.

(2) Produce a "reasonably accurate but no special-magic" library-based
implementation.

(3) Produce a compiled implemenation, but probably only after there is
substantial customer demand.

I think that just from the engineering point of view, doing 2 without doing
it well enough to be useful would be a waste of time.  And I have fairly
high confidence that the engineer that gets the task is not going to be
satisfied with producing [1;2]+[1;2] yielding [-300;470].  :-)

-- 
Lawrence Crowl